Creative Cakes & Cookies!

Posted By Bakery.com - on Jan 8, 2013

So we did something that came off pretty well today. We called it
Community Oven Day and in a nutshell, you let your customers come
in to your bakery with their prepared cookie recipes and then
your bakers bake them off in your commercial oven.

This idea stemmed from something I picked up at a seminar at
ZingTrain in Ann Arbor.
One of the attendees was from India. She talked about community
ovens - a common practice in many of the villages there. She said
that what folks do is drop off their unbaked breads, etc. in the
morning to the town baker and then pick them up in the afternoon
(finished and baked) on their way home from work. The concept
sounded really neat- and I thought it might fit in really well
here.

Well, the idea took off. I think we saw about 40 people in the
back of the bakery today. The attendees said they felt like "real
bakers" and we tied in a cookie contest to give them a chance to
"prove their stuff". From their point-of-view, having our bakers
bake off the recipes was fantastic because their cookies came out
evenly baked - and they did it in 1/4 of the time. Kind of like
going to the laundromat, right? They brought their children,
shared their recipes, took lots of pictures and had a great time.
The feedback was 100% positive - and many said we should do it
again around holidays.

Feel free to steal this idea for your own bakeries. It fosters
not only a sense of community, but it sends the message that
"scratch is best" - something that gets lost as customers
increasingly choose convenience over quality. View the event here
on our
FaceBook page.?